the craft. writing to process.

Photo by Susan Weber on Unsplash

“The writer’s responsibility (whatever her or his time) is to change the world — improve his/her own time. Or, less ambitious, to help make sense of it.” Toni Morrison, The Writer Before the Page /// The Source of Self-Regard

I am afraid. I am anxious. I am uncertain. At this moment as everything seems out of place, I find balance in the page. Not always in my commercial work, but sometimes simply in the confines of my journal. I am working actively to make sense of the world.

As Morrison references later in this essay, “not one sense” as there is no universal sense, it seems, to be made, but a sense that is helping me to process. We can take this into our work of fiction and nonfiction, but I find it helpful to explore before the page.

This essentially helps me to avoid journal entries leaking into places it doesn’t belong, because there is writing for yourself and writing for others. In a recent piece by Deesha Philyaw, she talked about some of the early work she’d written about her father and the gentle advice from her writing group that it wasn’t quite ready for public consumption. When we are developing as writers it can be difficult to tell the difference between the two.

We are in a time, as writers, as creatives, as people where the world feels on the brink of turning upside down. And there is so much to take in, so much to investigate that it can seem overwhelming thinking about it. But it’s important to decide what it is that you need at this very moment. Have you processed surviving a pandemic? Have you processed living in a country in pursuit of capital gain by any means necessary including the collateral damage of Black and brown bodies? And what will it mean for you? And what will it mean for your work?

If I’m honest, I’m barely able to function. Let alone come up with my most profound work. But if I keep writing, keep processing, both through formal channels like this newsletter but also pages of my notebook, I’ll eventually get back to being able to put together coherent sentences for my works of fiction.

It’s often debated whether fiction is of great use, and the short answer is of course. I tend not to want to engage with people who think otherwise. Fiction is a wonderful way into the worlds of others. A way to examine things, these works do ask questions of the world. What is it to have a gift that leads to fame? How does it contort who we are and/or plummet us into the depth of grief? Another work asks, are we really looking for autonomy or are we simply avoidant, victims to our fear? My personal investigation asks, what do these questions mean to me?

If you’re like me and working to process a lot these last few weeks, maybe some of the prompts below could be helpful.